Aitgotaclue, I have slight reservation with your penultimate para. Words and scripts (ie culture itself) only evolve organically and over time, through fermentation, from daily use by people. Once dead, they remain extinct. No amount of scholarly efforts would bring them back to life again.

China used to be called the country of characters. They evolved over thousands of years, their use spread to ancient East Asia. They are unique and beautiful, an essence of the Chinese culture and civilization.

The most basic scientific/rational guide to interpret results is to compare results when everything else being the same with just 1 variable different in 2 results... 1 common fallacy is to attribute simplified Chinese to a rise in literacy.

Well, look at Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They achieve near-universal literacy in less time than China. Despite the use of traditional Chinese characters.

The most dominant factor isn't simplified vs. traditional characters --- it is simpler than that. Can you guess? "More kids attending school and receiving an education!", that's what.

One other thing to consider: a modern literate Chinese knows on average 3000~5000 characters only. The # of simplified Chinese character set? 500~550 characters. That's 20% of less.

Look at it this way: if you only know those 550 characters, you are still illiterate, period. Do a simple exercise: take any Chinese article and punch a hole where the characets have not been simplified. What do you end up with? Well, you would be like a paleontologist looking at a few remnants of dinoasaurs skeleton :-)

More insidious than the simplification of the written script is the simplification of thinking and feelings. Compare a pre-war novel with a post-revolution one and you will find that there are words that have disappeared together with their meaning, because they have no equivalent simplified script and are too much trouble to learn and to print. Perhaps the feelings were too petty-bourgeois and politically incorrect. Many writers were hounded to their deaths during the cultural revolution for using some of those words, or expressing some of those sentiments.

Often, two different words with a common overlapping nuance are replaced by a single word, and the non-overlapping nuances are lost and no longer understood. Tento (April 25, 2009 11:33) cited a few examples of this phenomenon.

We should be less hung up about which script is used, so long as they contribute to effective communication and thinking. It is more critical for scholars to reach back in history and dig out some of the neglected words, to use them and bring them back to life again.

Traces of these words can be found in many dialects, but not in putonghua. Words which were brought into being as a result of human experience, pregnant with human frailty, words that are pungent with sweat and tears and gory with the blood of history. They should not disappear simply because they are too complicated for our lazy modern ethos.

I read traditional and simplified Chinese every day, and what irks me the most is how distorted some simplifications were.

Every single world has distinctive meanings and subtlety to it. The word choice is a big deal. It is like the difference between British English and American English. As illustration, "pretty" and "beautiful" both means something nice and also has its own distinct usage. Sure, a pretty woman and a beautiful woman seems much the same. But whereas you can say "pretty good", you won't say "beautiful good". Whereas "pretty trick" has somewhat negative conotation, but "beautiful trick" wouldn't.

But that's exactly what happened during simplification. Some characters simply disappeared and their simplified forms became some pre-existing (fewer-stroke) characters.

Look at it in this context. The old guards burned historical texts, shattered antiques, tried to do away with everything "traditional"... In such an environment, with the same people in charge, it would be naive to believe simplification took place in a rational environment.

The real sad truth is, European actually treasure and are proud of their heritage... but not the Chinese in 20th century. That's why you even have people running around, wanting to adopt roman characters. They hardly have any shred of appreciation of their own unique heritage.

The ugly truth is, simplification is quite a travesty... So badly done, even some simplifications were retracted by the Chinese government itself.

Abundance means lots of wheat, or rice, supplemented by (or even on the basis of, due to its nitrogen fixation capacity) beans. To replace it by one forlorn looking wheatgrass stem was an act of barbarism, only possible under a communism regime - another indicator that the PRC's recent claim of being the successor to the ancient Chinese civilization is indeed dubious.

Using a more traditional script would also allow greater commonality with Korean and Japanese populations. South Korea, after pursuing a deliberate program to phoneticize their language, is now re-introducing traditional Chinese characters into their national curricula. Japanese kanji, understandably, shares greater commonality with traditional Chinese characters than simplified.

The cultural power of this connection should not be underestimated. I have seen a sea-change in the attitudes of Korean/Japanese students towards China after learning Mandarin Chinese. The direct evidence of China's comprehensive cultural influence is eye-opening to them.

In the same vein, China should never attempt romanization, except as a pedagogical tool. Not only would it make Chinese much slower to read, but China would lose this valuable instrument of soft power. Thankfully, this is not being seriously considered.

Often in the traditional vs. simplified debate, the distinction between "old" simplifications (pre-1949) and "new" simplifications (post-1949) are blurred.

As the proponents of simplified-script are fond of saying, Chinese characters are always changing - indeed, that is true. Very ancient and stylized scripts (such as those found on official ink-stamps), are often illegible to the modern reader. Over long periods of time, the script slowly changes form, usually through simplification. But the speed of this shift should not be overstated. A reader of traditional script should be able to read 15th century text with no difficulty, and should have nearly perfect character recognition to about the 4th century.

However, this type of simplification comes as a direct and practical consequence of repeated writing. As any native Chinese knows, repeated writing of the same stroke sequence causes an unconscious simplification. The lines slur together, in a process not unlike cursive. Chinese "cursive" calligraphy was deliberately cultivated as an art form. The resulting simplified forms are often used even in traditional-script populations, particularly in informal settings, such as letters or posters. The Japanese standardized kanji has formalized some of these simplifications.

However, despite these simplifications, the overall aesthetic structure of the character is preserved, and with it, the cultural and historical nuances of that character. All characters give hints to their meaning and origin.

In contrast to this organic process, the simplified script is a violent shift in Chinese characters, giving rise to new character forms that could not possibly have arisen naturally. The disconnect between the traditional and simplified scripts divorces the simplified script of its historical origins (indeed, this was one of its goals).

If the Chinese government wishes to change the script, I hope it does so in a way that returns a generation of Chinese speakers to this historical path, so that the evolution of Chinese script can continue through natural means.

I'm certainly the last person with a stake in Chinese script. I'm not literate in either, though I learned quite a lot of the traditional script while a student in Taiwan. As far as beauty goes, the traditional wins. Even mainland Chinese would likely agree to that.

I was merely saying that as a logistical matter, changing a significant number of established characters at this point would be impractical. I realize all languages change...Chinese is complicated by the fixed characters in a way that phonetic scripts are not. I'm certainly not worried...I'm sure everything will work out.

The government deciding that some characters need fixing seems a little top heavy to me. The change is already made, best to leave it be. Reprogramming computers, altering font sets, and reprinting textbooks can certainly all be done, but what value would be gained?

Things could only be changed "at the press of a button" with millions of dollars and man-hours of behind-the-scenes work. I do agree, though, that the differences can be easily discerned with only a bit of study. All the more reason to leave it alone, in my opinion.

Frankly speaking I don't know what the fuss is all about. Since most information is online it is easy to change the characters at the press of a button.

The only time you might get in trouble is reading road signs, restaurant menus if a Taiwanese goes to mainland China or vice versa. It will take most people less than a day to get used to the changes for day-to-day stuff.

I would like to reiterate what elgreengeeto said--the 2 systems are pretty close and it takes minimal study to learn to recognize one when you are used to the other.

I think the problem with Chinese (or so I've heard) is that school children spend much longer learning to read and write than children in alphabetized languages.

With any difficult language (think of German, for example) you can try to simplify, but if you simplify too much, people will not be able to read what their forebears wrote a few hundred years ago. Written Chinese could potentially switch to a phonetic form using pinyin and tone markers...although using pinyin alone is pretty clear.

I don't think the modification is necessary in that the status quo is already good enough.
The standard is already there and everyone knows it and follows it, and there is no misconception caused by the written form itself. Remember, language is premarily for communication not for appreciation as an art. I believe the more simplified, the better.
A lot of characters in the simplied form just came form the so called "cursive writing"(caoshu,草书），which arose out of the need to write faster. "cursive writing" is definitely an art, therefore, can its mixed-blood son aslo be an art?